ratio maths problem

[kieran5405]

Hi,

I am trying to figure out this and it should be easy but im confusing myself.

I have a group of 7 men and 3 woman.
The men have taken 4 days sick leave and the women have taken 2 days.

If I say that men have 66.66% of the sick leave (ignoring the ratio of men vs women in the subset)...it is inaccurate as there are more men in the subset.

How would I work out a more exact figure bearing in mind the men vs women.

Thanks for any help...

[opus]

Welcome to VBForums

The men did take 66.66% of all the sick leave, such a statement is allways ignoring the ratio between women and men. All you can do is give the ratio between men and women as additional information.
Something like 70% of all people take 66%.66 of all the sick leave. You should have hear similar statement regarding the private income distribution (20 % of all XX earn 50% of the total private income).
Looking at your numbers, that 66.66% is pretty close to the ratio of 70%, especially if you look at your rather small test-group.

[kieran5405]

Thanks for the reply.

NB i simplified the figures stated to keep my message clear.

I see where you are going saying that i can put the men vs woman ratio as additional info.

But I was sure there was some way to take this into account to get a more accurate representation percentage.

For example, if there was 1 woman and 9 men...and the woman took 12 sick days and the men 13...then it looks inaccurate to me to say men take more sick days than women?

But if thats all i can do...i'll note the men vs woman ratio.

Thanks for your help.

[opus]

What you could do is, give a relation between "sickrate" men and women.
In your example each man would have a "sickrate" of 1.444 days(13/9), each women 9 days. Put them into relation with each other and you get that men have a "sickrate" of 0.16 compared to women (1.444/9).
I guess you were looking at such a number.

[jemidiah]

opus' "sickrate" is probably what you want. I just wanted to mention the units: they're sick days per man and sick days per woman. Given 1 woman with 12 sick days; 9 men with 13 sick days; the men have a sick rate of (13/9) days per man ~= 1.44 days per man, while the women (woman) have a sick rate of 12 days / woman. The female sick rate is then about 12/1.44 = 8.31 times higher than the male one. The ratio of these ratios (which is unitless) may also be what you want.

[opus]

....The male sick rate is then about 12/1.44 = 8.31 times higher than the female one.

Yes, I did take the wrong value to compare the sick rates (I used the number of men [9] instead of the computed sick rate for women[12]).
However your wording seems to be off, it should read:"The female sick rate is then about 12/1.44 = 8.31 times higher than the male one."

[jemidiah]

Yes, thank you. It's been edited .